“Fragments,” an unputdownable new essay by Brian Segal

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Fragments

by Brian Segal

You had better write it down before your mind locks it up and throws away the key.

Walking down Crescent Street in Montreal at about 3:00 in the morning circa 1971. The colors and slightly mad thoughts of psychedelic drugs done hours earlier fading away. Finding a club that opened after the others closed and seemed to cater to the March hare madness we were feeling. Drinking some good coffee served by a guy who KNEW how we were feeling. Strange times, but nothing really bad happened during those few, sometimes very strange days. I’m not quite sure why I have decided to start writing all this down. I suppose it’s normal to reminisce about the past from time to time. I have lost touch with most of the people I knew during the years lived in the McGill Ghetto. Rent came to about $30 a month for a shared apartment. The area has long since been gentrified and turned into luxury condos.

I’m also not quite sure why it turned out the way it did. Almost all the people I knew back then are now lawyers living in Ontario. There’s also one doctor, who is head of family medicine at a large Ottawa hospital. What happened to all the others?—I’m not quite sure.

I have to make it clear that even though there were lots of drugs, long hair and shared living arrangements…we were not hippies in the true sense of the word. Mostly kids from middle to upper middle class backgrounds, who just became enmeshed in the time’s tidal wave that swept up a lot people. The people I knew might have smoked marijuana or hashish and also occasionally ingested some mescaline or LSD. The hard narcotics were not part of our lifestyle.

Although becoming a lawyer or a doctor may not seem like any kind of break from traditional society, many people held true to their beliefs in one form or another—becoming labour lawyers or, in the case of the physician, becoming one of the leading family doctors in Ontario.

Traveling abroad was also very popular. From today’s frame of reference, it was incredibly inexpensive and very uncomplicated. Traveling in Europe with a backpack was the way to go, although some of the truly adventurous souls trekked through the Far East.

I ended up in Israel, and traveled with a friend, Neil, for awhile. We ended up living in the old city of Jerusalem. Back then, terrorism and bombings were not really a concern. And besides, we were usually too stoned to even think about that. We rented rooms from an old woman who owned a home next to the Lutheran hostel in the old walled city. The domed ceilings were a pale blue plaster. It cost us each about a dollar a day for the room. We had our daily routine. I’m not sure what time we woke up in the morning, but each day we would explore the narrow alleys of the ancient city. Late at night, there was a bakery that made rolls stuffed with cheese. They were delicious. The problem was, if there was a problem, that before going there we would make our nightly trip to the smokehouse. For a couple of Israeli pounds, we would sit around a water pipe, which was continually being refilled with hashish. After a couple of hours, and once we were able to walk again, we would go off to the bakery. Hash and freshly baked rolls just seem to go together. We would gobble down a couple of rolls each, while they were still hot. Our Marx Brothers movie ritual would continue, because every night the same thing would happen. We would get lost. We’d wander around the dark alleys, hopelessly confused. We weren’t concerned about the fact that we were lost, it would just happen. The end result would be the same every time. Just when we thought we would never find it back to the home in which we were staying, we would encounter what appeared to be, at least to us, a very very old night-watchman or policeman. I suppose he was a policeman, because he carried a machine gun. For some reason the machine gun did not concern us at all. There were always lots of soldiers and policemen around carrying guns. The man did not speak any English or French, but all we had to do was mention the Lutheran hostel and with a smile he would lead us back to the door. I seem to remember he had a great handlebar moustache. Now that I think back so did the elderly Arab man who passed around the hookah at the smokehouse. (Hashish was of course illegal, but that was 1971 and, well, you know.)

Then there was the time we decided to hitchhike to San Francisco. We made it as far as the outskirts of Chicago. We managed to get a ride there from this guy who stopped to pick us up just outside of Detroit. We spent a day or two there, at his house, until we decided to just spend the rest of our money and fly the rest of the way. We landed in San Francisco, and immediately proceeded to Haight Ashbury. We wandered around a bit looking for a place to stay until we met two young women, who said we could come up and stay at their apartment. They were about our age, early 20s, and each had a young child. The apartment was on Eddy Street, which was right in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. One night they asked if we wanted to go see a band they knew. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Oakland to see the band Tower of Power. We watched the band play, and after they had finished we went back with the band to their house. To use the vernacular of the time, we popped some acid and spent the night there.

Some of the rooms of their house were decorated in a kind of interesting way. The living room had a small table and chairs…mounted on the ceiling! (Exactly what you needed to see when you were really stoned.) The flow of events is not very clear in my mind, but we ended up going to Yosemite National Park. It wasn’t really as crowded then as it is now. Supposedly, now you need reservations at times to get into it. Our camping preparations were not exactly perfect. Basically all we had were sleeping bags, and maybe a flashlight. The park was a spectacular place. We were at a campground from which we could see the falls and the sheer rock cliffs. I happened to be walking around and came across a woman playing a guitar. She was alone when I just sat down beside her to listen to the music. She was attending Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. We became friendly, and I ended up spending some time with her at her place in Palo Alto.

The friend I did most of my traveling with in the States went on to become the road manager for Jesse Winchester’s band. He passed away a number of years ago, while living down south.

All of the above seems to have happened lifetimes ago. They are bits and pieces of experiences that sometimes are difficult to remember, not because I don’t want to, but because sometimes they’re hidden behind a fog.

I’m not sure why I decided to write all of this. Everyone has their story.

Maybe, it’s just like I said: I’d better write it down before I forget it.

Brian Segal is living in the country north of Montréal. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about 18 years ago and, when asked, tells people he is retired (It sounds a lot better than telling people you are on disability insurance). He is happily married, no children, but one very friendly husky cross. He also has the good fortune of living in his own home, not a home.

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